Barack Obama v Mitt Romney? That's a sideshow. What's really at stake here is the soul of political punditry

The guys in the Air Force One press pack are feeling threatened by Nate and the nerds

It's a momentous night! A huge, thundering, game-changing, once-in-a-lifetime night which will forever alter the face of US and world politics!

Also, at some point this evening, we'll find out who the US president will be for the next four years.

I'm underplaying that a bit, of course (but not all that much, if the killjoy Allan Massie is to be believed: "It's really not that big a deal," he sniffs, hardly playing the MEGA EXCITEMENT ELECTION THUNDERBALL BOOM HURRAH BANG IT'S LITERALLY THE MOST AMAZING THING EVER TO HAPPEN EVER game at all). I am excited, and nervous, because I would rather one of the men who are competing for the office won it than the other one did (plus that person winning is worth a total of £220 to me). But in the end, whoever wins, the next president will be fighting one House of Congress or the other to get anything done. People who know more about this stuff than me say it's going to be a lot of deadlock with occasional compromise, not a new New Deal or anything.

But what we will find out is whether the new-model political pundits, the quants, have refined their methods to the point that we can do away with old-school, gut-feel, inside-story campaign hacks once and for all.

Because that's what's brilliant. In almost every field of expertise, there has been, over the years, a move away from received wisdom to cold numbers. Medicine was the first to go – Archie Cochrane and his ilk showing the medical establishment that their instincts and experience were no match for systematically collected data. In recent years something similar has happened with trading – see Nicholas Nassim Taleb's books Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan for more details. And, of course, sports have seen their own stats revolution, since Moneyball and sabermetrics transformed baseball, and something similar is moving into football as well.

But while polling has been a feature of politics for decades, it's only really since 2008 that there has been this truly methodical approach to the numbers the polls provide: feeding those numbers into a model, seeing how that model predicts the world, and refining it. Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight is of course the most famous, but Votamatic, RealClearPolitics and the Princeton Election Consortium all run their own.

This time, most of them are saying that Mitt Romney's only chance of winning is if the polls are hugely and systematically untrustworthy. Even the usually cautious Silver has put Barack Obama at better than 90 per cent likely to win. Basically, if Romney wins, there will be serious questions over the systematic method: not unanswerable questions, but serious ones that will take time to address. If nothing else, rightly or wrongly, people will be far less willing to trust Silver et al's predictions in 2016.

A few of my colleagues are worried that it's taking the soul out of politics, in some way, but I don't see why that's a problem. There's still room for experts to tell us why a particular candidate or policy is good for the economy, good for a particular demographic, or just good, morally. There's still room for political journalists to explain the process stories, and to get the inside scoops that could change the course of elections. But there will, probably, be less room for them to tell us who is likely to win the election, because there are other people now who can do that better.

And if it happens in political horseracing, who knows: maybe it'll move into policy as well. Maybe we'll start running policies not on whether they look good on the 10 O'Clock News or whether they Feel Right to a politician, but on objective statistical analyses of whether they work or not. Randomised controlled trials, longitudinal studies, systematic reviews. And then we might be able to get government that works. But that's quite a long way off: let's just start with political punditry that works, and go from there.